The word "博客" (bókè) for "blog" is formed through a common modern Chinese process of phonetic and semantic borrowing from English. It is a direct transliteration where the sounds of the English word "blog" are approximated using two existing Chinese characters: "博" (bó), which carries meanings like "wide" or "rich", and "客" (kè), meaning "guest" or "visitor". Crucially, the characters are not chosen at random; they were selected because their combined meaning, suggesting a "knowledgeable visitor" or someone who shares widely, creates a new, conceptually appropriate term that sounds like the original foreign word while also making intuitive sense in Chinese.